Part 3

The gin rickey proved to be an immediate reality, in the patio of the Inglaterra--a stream of silver bubbles shot into a glass where an emerald lime floated vivaciously. I had no intention of going out again until the shadows of the late afternoon had lengthened far toward the white front of the Gomez-Mena building across the plaza; and after lunch I went up to the quiet of my room. I should, certainly, write no letters, read--idly--none of the few books published about Cuba, which were on my table; and I began the essays of James Huneker called Bedouins. His rhapsodies over Mary Garden, as colorful in style as the glass above the window, I soon dropped and picked indifferently among the novels that remained. A poor lot--the thin current stream of American fiction, doubly pale in Havana.

The day wheeled from south to west. I was perfectly contented to linger doing nothing, scarcely thinking, in the subdued and darkened heat. There was a heavy passage of trunks through the echoing hall without, the melancholy calling of the evening papers rose on the air; I was enveloped in the isolation of a strange tongue. To sit as still as possible, as receptive as possible, to stroll aimlessly, watch indiscriminately, was the secret of conduct in my situation. Nothing could be planned or provided for. The thing was to get enjoyment from what I did and saw; what benefit I should receive, I knew from long experience, would be largely subconscious. I had been in Havana scarcely more than a day, and already I had collected a hundred impressions and measureless pleasure. How wise I had been to come ... extravagantly, with--as it were--a flower in my coat, a gesture of protest, of indifference, to all that the world now emphasized.

* * * * *

However, the tranquillity of the afternoon was sharply interrupted by my going, unexpectedly, to the races at Oriental Park. I had to dress with the utmost rapidity, leaving the choice of a tie to chance, for the dun car of the United States Military Attaché was waiting for me. The Attaché, handsomely bearing the brown seal of Philippine campaigns, abstracted in manner, sat forward with an imperturbable military chauffeur, while the back of the car was flooded by the affable speech of a Castilian marquis whose variety of experience in the realms of expert and dangerous games had been limited only by their known forms. It was unquestionably the mixture of my commonplace Presbyterian blood and incurable habit of romance that gave me a distinct satisfaction in my surroundings. I was glad that the Marquis was what he was and that he held a trans-continental motor record; it pleased my honest democratic instincts when other cars were held back for our progress; and, finally, the deep chairs on the veranda of the Jockey Club were precisely right for a lounging afternoon in an expensive sporting atmosphere.

The race track seemed to me long--was it a mile?--and, with the horses at a starting post across from the grandstand, I couldn't tell one from another. The grandstand was on the right, and beyond the park were low monotonous lines of stables. It had been raining, the track was heavy, and the race that followed the blowing of a bugle covered the silk of the jockeys with mud. My pleasure, as always, slowly subsided at the persistent intrusion of an inner destructive questioning. Incontestably the racing, the horses lining fretfully and scrambling through the muddy pools, left me cold. The sweep of the Jockey Club, too, was comparatively empty of interest; the spectators there, though they were more or less intent upon the results posted on the board opposite, were not the immemorial onlookers at such affairs of sweepstakes, selling plates and furloughs.

The Cuban women present, elaborately dressed for shaded lawns and salons de thé, were largely foreign to the wide-spread open spectacle. I remembered English races where groups of dukes with ruddy features, in rough tweeds, sat through drizzling afternoons on their iron-shod seat ricks, and women of title, in waterproofs and harsh brogues, tramped through the sloshing turf ... an attitude far removed from Havana. A group of royal palms, lifted in the middle distance, alone gave the races an exotic air; though they were, of course, promoted and ridden by Americans, and their mechanics were quite those which operated in New Orleans and Butte and Baltimore. Now I was annoyed because I had, thoughtlessly, come; I might as well have gone to the baseball game in what had formerly been the bull ring.

Yet I could retire to my speculations for escape, and I thought how peculiarly modern outdoor games, sport, belong to the British--to them and their relatives beyond the sea. I remembered, in this connection, the story of a French vicomte I knew, a man of imposing build, who, in yellow gloves, shot field larks attracted by the flashing of a mirror manipulated by his valet. Le sport! But the Spaniards, bred to the delicate agility of bull fighting, trained in endurance on the inconceivably fast pelota courts, were more athletic than the French; though, as a race, they were inclined to delegate their games to professionals. The sporting amateur, in spite of the Marquis, was a rarity; rather they chose to be lookers-on at brilliant diversions which retained an appreciable amount of a mediæval cruelty diversified from our own brutal strain.

This, naturally, had been influenced, strengthened, in Cuba by the climate, the breath of the tropics; even the winters were not conducive to violent exercise, aside from the fact that that was the prerogative of stolid temperaments. It was the deliberate, the unexcitable, who most excelled at trials of personal muscular skill; and neither of them were at home below certain latitudes. For myself, I was grateful, for I hadn't much in common with the exemplifications of field skill I had met. They were very apt to pay for their success by the absence of the attributes I particularly admired; often they were snobs of a very exasperating type--monuments of college beef with irreproachable hair, sacrosanct pins, and insensate conventional mentalities.

A race at an end, the jockeys, carrying their saddles, trooped to the judges' stand to be weighed, and I was shocked by their wizened, preternaturally cunning faces. They were like pygmies of a strange breed in red and yellow and blue satins; faultless for their purpose, on the ground they were extraordinary, leather-skinned, with puckering eyes, drawn mouths, and distorted bodies. They wrangled among themselves in shrill or foggy voices--a very depressing specialization of humanity. But the horses were magnificent, slender and shining. I admired them from a distance, glad that it was no part of my responsibility to ride. Long ago, under the pressure of an untender emotion, I had learned to sit on a horse through his reasonable moments; but I had never become at ease, and I stopped riding when, on the country road of a May Sunday noon, a tall sorrel ran away with me so fast and so far that we passed three churches with their scattering congregations.

There were, on the veranda, drinks, and even they--the Scotch highballs--translated into Spanish, had an unfamiliar and borrowed sound. It was on my return, stopping at the Telegrafo Café, that I learned the delightful possibility of a Daiquiri cocktail. It was twice as large as ordinary, what in the north was called a double; but no Daiquiri out of Cuba could be thought of in comparison. Only one other drink might be considered--a Ramos gin-fizz. My extreme allegiance had been given to the latter. I was not willing, even in the Telegrafo, to depose it from first place; but the Telegrafo was a pleasanter spot than the New Orleans Stag bar. I could see the beginning of the Prado, with the swirl of cars on their afternoon round to the Malecón. Some arc-lights, just turned on, were sources of color, like great symmetrical lemons, rather than of illumination. After another rain the bare flambeau trees would burst into fiery bloom.

I was alone, and, sauntering back to the Inglaterra, through the gallery that had once been the Paseo Isabel, I came on my flower man, who advanced with a smile and a close nosegay of gardenias. A curious flower, I thought, getting water for them in a glass. They didn't wilt, as was usual, but turned brown and faded in the manner of a lovely pallid woman--a simile I had used in Linda Condon. A flower that belonged less to nature than to drawing-rooms, to rococo salons and the opera loges of eighteen forty, and not at all to the present in the United States. But worn low on the neck, it was entirely appropriate to the black hair of the Cuban woman. Gold hair, the fair temperament, had no business with gardenias: bouquets of white sweet peas looped with pale green and silver ribbon, yes; and dark bunches of moss roses; the old bouquets of concentric rings of buds in lace paper! They were the property of the girls I had known, the frank girls with clear grey eyes and the appealing girls with eyes like forget-me-nots. Something more poignant, a heavier disturbing perfume, was necessary against a figure seen only from a balcony or with a vague fleetness behind a grille gracefully wrought out of iron.

My shutters now were opened, and I could make out, against the dimming sky, the languid folds of the Spanish flag above the entrance of the Centro Gallego--the standard that had conquered the western tropics, only, in turn, to be subdued by a freedom of the wind mightier than His Most Catholic Majesty.

* * * * *

There was some question of where I'd go for dinner, for in Havana there were many cafés to explore--the Dos Hermanos, the Paris, the Florida, the Hotel de Luz, the Miramar; but, finally, I walked down to the Prado, to the sea and the Miramar, a little because of its situation, directly on the Malecón, but principally for the reason that it had one of the most beautiful names possible, a name which called up the image of a level tide so smooth that it held in shining replica the forts, the ships, and the clouds. Tables were prepared for dinner in the restaurant, while those on the terrace were without cloths; but there I determined to sit, and the waiter whose attention I captured, after a long delay, agreed.

A solitary couple had their heads together by the window, and they, with myself, were the only diners. It was, evidently, not now the place to go to at this hour. Beyond the dining-room, a patio, or rather an open court, was set for dancing, melancholy as such spaces can be, deserted and half-lighted; but I saw that a considerable activity was expected much later.

I was glad that the terrace was empty, for, with the light now faded from the sea and its blueness merging into black, the remote tranquillity of evening was happier without a sharp chatter of voices. The Miramar, considering its place--the most advantageous in all Havana--and fame was surprisingly small: scarcely more than two stories high, the sombre maroon walls with their long windows hardly filled an angle of the Malecón. The dinner was slow in arriving, the silver made its appearance, a goblet was brought separately, a plate of French bread was later followed by its butter. The minute native oysters were no more than shreds adhering to their shells, but they had a notable flavor; a crawfish was at its brightest apogee; and an omelet browned in a delicate perfection of powdered sugar.

I deserted Spanish wine, the admirable Riscal, for champagne; for there was about an air of departed charm, the whisper of old waltzes and tarleton, that demanded commemoration. The Miramar had been the gay center of that mid-century life which had folded Havana in the lasting influence of its memories. A gaiety not even at a disadvantage compared to the feverish society of to-day! The bodices then had been no more than scraps of chambery gauze and Chinese ribbon below shoulders to the whiteness of which the entire feminine age had been devoted. The flounced bell skirts had swung airily on gracious silk clappers.

The automobiles on the Malecón multiplied, for the night was hot; soon there was a solid double opposed procession on the broad sweeping drive. This was a triumph of American engineering and, I had no doubt, an improvement on the informality of rocks and débris that had existed before. Yet I should liked to have seen it when the promenade had not yet been laid down with mechanical precision, in, perhaps, the early seventies. Then there were sea baths cut in the live rock at the end of the Paseo Isabel, at the Campos Eliseos, where the water was like a cooler liquid green air, and where, after storms, a foaming surf poured over the barriers. There were no motors then, but volantes and the modern quintrins, with two horses, one outside the shafts, and a riding calesero in vermilion and gold lace; and, latest of all, as new as possible, the victorias.

Neither, then, was the Prado paved, but the trees were infinitely finer--five rows there were in fifty-seven--when the clamor of the city was, in great part, peals of bells. This was a familiar process with me, to leave the present for the past in a mood of irrational regret. But never for the heroic, the real past; the years I chose to imagine lay hardly behind the horizon; in Italy it had been the Risorgimento, at farthest the villeggiatura of Antonio Longo or the viole d'amore of Cimarosa in churches. And now, drinking my champagne on the empty flagged terrace of the Miramar, facing, across the parade of automobiles, the blank curtain of the night, starred on the right by the lights of castellated forts, my mind vibrated with grace notes no longer heard outside the faint distilled sweetness of music boxes.

As if in derision of this, a loud unexpected music rose from the bandstand in the Plaza, and I saw that a flood of people, seated or moving along the pavements and through the lanes of chairs, had gathered. Nothing, I thought, could have delighted me more; but my anticipation was soon smothered by the absurdity of the selections: they were not from Balfé nor Rossini, neither military nor the accented rhythm of Spain ... the opening number was Parsifal, blown into the profound night with a convention of brassy emphasis.

At the total destruction of my pleasure I cursed the pretentious stupidity of the band-master and a great deal else of modern Cuba. I remembered particularly some regrets, locally expressed, that the Spanish domination was no more. Things, it was said, were better ordered then. But this was a position the vainness of which I couldn't join: it was no part of my disposition to combat, or even regret, the inevitable. My course--quite other--was to project myself into periods whose very loss formed most of their charm. Gone, they took on the tender memories of the dead, and were invested with the dignity, the beauty, of a warm fragility.

Two girls were now seated at a table by the entrance, and, though they were alone for the moment, it was evident that they had no intention of remaining in that unprofitable state longer than necessary. Their fleet appraising glances rested on me and the silver bucket by my chair, and one permitted the shadow of a discreet smile to appear on her carmined lips. She was pretty, lightly dressed in a flowery summer stuff, but she was as gold in coloring as corn silk; an intrusion in Havana I seriously deplored. The other was dark, but she was, at the same time, disagreeable; something had annoyed her excessively, and I made no move. Such company was occasionally entertaining, in a superficial conversational sense; but, I was obliged to add, not often.

I went over all the informal girls I could recall who had been worth the effort to cultivate them, either charming or wise or sensitive, and my bag, unlike Chopin's or what George Moore reported his, was discouragingly slim. They had been, but perhaps of necessity, materialists, valuers only of the expensively concrete; yes, the majority of such adventures had been sordid. It was due, without question, to certain deterrent qualities in my own personality; but even more, I was convinced, to the fact that, in America, girls, or at least those of my youth, regarded emotion as portentously synonymous with ruin. Emotion, for nice girls, was deprecated; their sense of modesty, of shame, was magnified at the expense of everything else. This, together with the tragic difference in the age of marriage in nature and in society, had condemned the United States to very low levels of feeling.

Unfortunately I had been born into the most rigid of all societies--a prosperous and Presbyterian middle-class; an influence that succeeded in making religion hideous before I was fifteen, planting in me, too, the belief that man was, in his instinctive life, filthy. I outgrew the latter, but never the first; and now, looking back, I could recognize how that lauded creed had nearly damned me to a hell far surpassing in dreadfulness anything of its own bitter imagining. The cold metaphysical fog had saturated us all alike.... How dreary my early experience was ... what detestable travesties of passion! A carful of young men soon stopped at the curb of the Miramar, and the two girls, dark and gold, were immediately invested with the politest attentions. There was a chorus of laughter and protests and suggestions, in which a privileged waiter joined; and afterwards they vociferously left to dance at Carmelo.

* * * * *

Walking generally in the direction of my room, I left the Prado for an especially dramatic, no, melodramatic, street, where the bare walls and iron bolted doors were made startling by the white glare of electric lights. Fixed to the walls, infrequently, were the wrought-iron brackets of the earlier lanterns, converted, it might be, for the period before the present, into gas jets. In that watery illumination such streets must have seemed less amazing than now, and entirely natural with only the oil lanterns lifting a small surface of masonry or an isolated angle out of the night. Indeed, whole districts were dark, except for a rare lamp privately maintained as an obligation of grace. That darkness, like the streets, was mediæval; they belonged one to the other--ways through which it was congruous to carry a flare and a sword, practical measures both.

These precautions had been long discarded, but the passages themselves were unchanged, not a stone had shifted; they were, particularly at night, the Middle Ages. And it was as though a sudden blaze had been created by unholy magic; a sparkling and infernal radiance, throwing into intolerable clearness the decent reticence of the time. The arc lights gave the streets an absolute air of unreality and tragic strangeness. Moving in them, I had the feeling of blundering awake into a dream, of being irretrievably lost in an illusion of potential horror. An open door with its glimpse into an inner room only increased the oppression: it, too, was brilliant with electricity, a room of unrelieved icy pallor, except for a warmer blur under an Agony on the Cross, where a small company of men and women sat in a rigid blanched formality that might have been death.

It was quite natural, a commonplace of Havana; but rather than a picture of familiar life, it resembled the memento mori of a grotto. My thoughts turned to the symbols and representations of the Catholic Church--a business of blood and torment and flame, of Sebastian torn with arrows and a canonized girl, whose name I forgot, carrying her eyeballs in a hand. Curiously enough, the spirit which had given birth to this suffering had been popularly lost, together with any conception of the ages in which it occurred; and all that remained was a pathological horror. Italy and Spain were saturated by it--Italy in the revolting wax spectacles of Easter, and Spain with the veritable crucifixions of to-day.

It was, I supposed, to a certain extent unavoidable in an establishment whose hold on the ponderable present depended on threats and promises laid in the future. But it seemed to me unfortunate, to say the least, that a church whose business was life should be so concerned with smoky death. Threats and promises! The early history of Cuba, I remembered, was inbound with the administrative and protective powers of the Church: in fifteen hundred and sixteen the native Cubeños were put in the charge of the Order of Jeronimites, localized in La Espanola--Santo Domingo. The double motive of the Spanish Christian kings in the western hemisphere had been conversion and gold, but which of these was uppermost it was impossible to determine. However, when the gold, the temporal interest, decreased in one locality, the spiritual concern of Seville shifted to the more productive regions.

That was a period, a conquest, when a violent death was a greater blessing than living in a state of damnable heresy; and so, between the saving of their souls and the loss of their bodies in the king's mines, the natives were thoroughly cared for. It must be said, though, that de las Casas, a priest whose spirit was above any intimidation or venality, denounced the outrages against the Cuban Indians to the shining heavens, the cerulean sea, the Audencia, and the Throne. But his humanitarianism was ineffectual against a system founded on the belief that a god had given the earth and its recalcitrant people for the profit and glory, the servants, of a single religious dogma.

It was, possibly, a mental imperfection which gave impressions, emotions, such a great suggestibility. Returning toward the Inglaterra, I had no intention of losing myself in the mazes of applied theology; and I speedily dropped such a sombre topic from my thoughts. Turning back to the Prado, I found the walks filled with men, progressing slowly or seated on the flat marble benches along the sides. Whenever a woman did pass on foot, their interest and speculations were endless: heads turned in rows, sage remarks were exchanged, and tentative simpaticas murmured. Her mother--if she had the slightest pretensions to youth or good looks--was fervently blessed for so fetching a daughter. Here, of course, was the defect of the local attitude toward women--it put the emphasis perpetually on a gallantry affecting the men more even than the women. There was a constant danger of becoming one-sided.

The Telegrafo and the Louvre were crowded, with more refrescos and ices on the table than authoritative drinks; the cigarettes of the discursive throngs in the Parque Central were like a sheet of fire-flies, and the Marti and Pairet theatres were spreading abroad the audiences of their second evening shows. The patio of the Inglaterra was well filled, and I stopped there; not, however, for a naranjada. Some late suppers were still occupying the dining-room, and a drunken American was gravely addressing a table and meeting with a mechanical politeness that I admired for its sustained patience. He left, finally, and wandered unsteadily, a subject of entertainment for his fellows and a mark of contempt to the Cubans present. Beyond me were some beautifully dressed English--two men in the final perfection of easy masculine garb and a girl, flushed with beauty, in pearls. On the other hand a young Frenchman, decorated with the most honorable of war ribbons, and two women, all in mourning, were conversing in the difficult Parisian idiom.